Kenya’s first execution in 27 years was ordered yesterday of a 41-year old male nurse for a failed abortion that led to a young woman’s death.

The judge said he had taken into consideration the fact that two lives were lost:

“He has killed two people; a foetus and a mother. The only sentence available in law is the death penalty,” Judge Ombija ruled.

Outsiders don’t realize how incredibly pro-Life the vast majority of law in the developing world is. What is even more ironic, though, is that while developing world law is crystal clear on the issue, these laws are rarely enforced.

Islamic ruled countries generally leave the consequences of a revealed abortion to the family. Those consequences are often crueler if the cultural edict is carried out. The widely interpreted Koranic punishment for adultery is being stoned to death, and generally any woman who seeks an abortion in the Muslim world is considered adulterous.

But it remains unknown and likely vastly underestimated the number of abortions in the Muslim world that are simply swept under the carpet.

In the non-sectarian ruled countries like Kenya abortion is just as illegal, but there are countless numbers of abortions, anyway. Authorities normally don’t enforce the law. Yesterday’s sentence, after all, is the first ever given.

“Our analysis indicates that an estimated 464,690 induced abortions occurred in Kenya in 2012,” Kenya’s own Ministry of Health reported last year. Each one of those if adjudicated would result in a death sentence.

The Kenyan Ministry report also concludes that the mortality rate of these attempted abortions is so high that it is a significant factor in Kenya’s escalating health care costs.

Many other reports circulating in Kenya indicate one of the reasons there are so many abortion attempts is because contraception is either too expensive or frowned upon by cultural and religious leaders.

Kenya law is clear: abortions are illegal. Legislative attempts to change this, including by women activists who lobbied hard to make abortion legal in Kenya’s revised Constitution of 2007, were all soundly defeated by Parliament.

It was, however, a “perfect storm” for 41-year old nurse, Jackson Namunya Tali, who will now become known as either the first or the only abortion provider to have been sentenced to death.

Tali operated one of probably dozens if not hundreds of abortion clinics in shady areas of Nairobi where police rarely appear. He is a fully trained nurse whose pay under the national health system is likely 1/100th of what he earned at his clinic.

He was much more compassionate than most abortion providers who dump their patients out the front door as fast as they can once the procedure is over.

The particular patient in question had complications, and Tali tried to deal with them for more than a week before he personally tried to race the her to the hospital in his own car. She died enroute, and instead of then abandoning her, he himself called the police.

Clearly the man was empathetic, hardly the criminal type that the vast majority of less well trained and less sensitive abortion providers in Kenya are. He seemed generally distressed that his efforts with this woman failed.

His empathy led to his sentence.

This was not big news in Kenya. In fact the major media outlets didn’t even carry it. And the few comments that appeared in the digital world were mostly in support of the judge.